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Last month, Federal Communications Commission Chair and ex-Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai callously repealed the tenets of net neutrality. Despite the high volume of calls into Congress, widespread protests at Verizon locations and a months-long mobilization by the online coalition known as Team Internet, the FCC went ahead and jeopardized the internet as we know it.

Scores of groups and organizations are already working hard to convince Congress to reverse the FCC’s decision. But an altogether different approach is also underway: Pushing local communities to form their own municipal broadband utility in order to get around the Big Telecom stranglehold.

In communities with a municipal broadband utility, the local government provides, or partially provides, broadband internet access to all citizens. In these towns and cities, internet is treated as a public utility – one that is city-owned and city-operated, much like electricity, water and garbage pick-up.

Cities have been working toward the community broadband goal for some time. According to Community Networks, a project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, more than 95 U.S. communities already have a publicly-owned Fiber to the Home (FTTH) network reaching most of the community. Some 110 communities in 24 states have a publicly-owned network offering at least 1 Gigabit of services, and 77 communities have a publicly-owned cable network that reaches most of the community.

Still, as the shift to community-owned broadband internet gathers steam, a few disadvantages remain – like its prohibitive cost. The city of Fort Collins, Colo., had to come up with $150 million in bond money to amend the city charter and allocate funds for its broadband construction project. The price of broadband implementation in Seattle, Wa., is somewhere between $480 to $665 million, according to a city-commissioned study.

However, municipalities have gotten creative in their quest to fund these projects. The majority of cities use revenue bonds, but other cities have also turned to bank financing, interdepartmental loans, grants, an increase in taxes, and capital reserve savings.

Big Telecom and other private companies often claim that municipal broadband will lead to government surveillance of website usage through regulatory policy. In response to such concerns, Seattle launched a “digital privacy initiative” that defines exactly what information is shared with government, and how. Furthermore, while private ISPs love to chastise the government for overreach of power, they forget to mention that they openly share customer information with advertisers, governments and law enforcement without warrants or permission from users.

On the other hand, when a community provides broadband internet access, elected officials can be held accountable for misuse, unlike corporate behemoths like Comcast and Verizon.

Now, more and more individuals and communities are starting to ask the question: Is municipal broadband internet better than our current options? Looking again at Seattle as an example, there are currently three ISPs operating in that city. Comcast offers 150 Mbps (Megabits per second) download service, Centurylink started rolling out FTTP gigabit services in two neighborhoods serving 22,000 customers at a cost of $150 a month, and Wave is piloting FTTP service to 600 customers.

Meanwhile, a feasibility study recently concluded that a city-owned public internet service could provide 1 Gbps (Gigabit per second) to every neighborhood in Seattle for a monthly charge of $45 per household. One might consider the economic argument, not to mention the privacy one, settled.

Already there are several problems with the private industry approach. First, individuals are paying a substantially higher amount for vastly degraded service (150 Mbps compared to 1 Gbps). Second, there is not uniform access based on equity; the current ISPs are offering fast service to only a select group of customers. Lastly, if a resident is lucky enough to be offered fast service, s/he must pay the hefty price tag of around $150 a month, triple the broadband cost.

Private ISP companies understand the repercussions of community-owned internet for their businesses. As such, they have gone to great lengths to combat these progressive initiatives. For example, as Fort Collins prepared to vote on its ballot measure to allocate money for community-owned broadband service, the telecom industry spent over $900,000 in a failing effort to defeat the measure.

However, citizens face an additional hurdle for creating widespread city-owned or community-owned internet service: It remains against the law in many states. Currently, 21 states have laws making it difficult or illegal to create community broadband networks. Therefore, repealing this anti-broadband legislation is a giant first step that residents in those states could take.

Citizens will also need to take action in the courts. “Nearly 20 state attorneys generals [sic] have announced they will sue the FCC over their decisions to repeal Title II net neutrality rules and to prevent state’s from taking action to protect net neutrality. Free Press and other nonprofit organizations will also sue,” warned the website Popular Resistance.

Community-owned broadband is a great alternative to the impositions of private companies and their mono- or duopolistic price gouging. In addition to providing a service outside of the hands of profiteering private industry, communities that welcome broadband are taking steps to become more autonomous and self-reliant. It’s little surprise that more residents are now acting to move their cities’ internet service in this direction – creating a web that is more dependable, affordable and equitable.

If you look up the individual “Jon Corzine” on Wikipedia, the first sentence you encounter is “Jon Stevens Corzine is an American finance executive and political figure.”

Those two positions strung together in the same sentence may make some people uneasy, but the fact is that you can apply this description to many people in Congress. Looking closer, Jon Corzine may simply be the most poignant symbol of the incestuous relationship between bankers, business and Congress that is systemic in today’s political system.

Recently, Jon Corzine — CEO of MF Global from 2010 to 2011, CEO of Goldman Sachs from 1994 to 1999, Senator of New Jersey from 2001 to 2006 and Governor of New Jersey from 2006 to 2010 — was subpoenaed before a House committee to answer questions regarding the loss of approximately $1.6 billion of citizens’ money.

The “honorable” Jon Corzine, as his nametag so colorfully and inaccurately described him, claimed he did not know where the funds went. The House committee asked him, along with other MF Global executives: “Where is the money?” His response: “I don’t know.”

“OK,” replied the committee.

Could lawmakers’ passivity possibly be attributed to the amount of money those committee members received from financial agencies and trading groups to keep their mouths shut? Given the evidence, it’s a worthwhile question.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Committee chairman Spencer Bachus has received $262,177 from securities and investment firms, $78,677 of which was individual donations, the other $183,500 from PACs. He has also received $259,400 from commercial banks and $241,960 from insurance companies, a blend of PACs and individual contributions.

Open Secrets, the website of the Center for Responsive Politics, features a stunning chart demonstrating how the House Financial Services Committee as a whole has received an astonishing $11,425,875 from financial, real estate and insurance firms through PACs, and an additional $10,106,258 from individual contributions in the same fields.

But let’s go deeper — to those with even more power.

Earlier this year on June 13, Jamie Dimon — CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Class A director of the board of directors of the New York Federal Reserve, who worked at and helped to create the Citigroup mega-bank before he left it in 1998 — faced a Senate hearing over JP Morgan’s loss of more than $2 billion.

The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs has 22 members, and 18 of those members are either directly or indirectly invested in JP Morgan. In between the star-struck gazing, admiration and lax questions, only a handful of senators, including New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez, managed to make Dimon slightly uncomfortable by asking difficult questions about the company’s malfeasance.

Many of the committee members’ aides are now lobbyists for JP Morgan or investment companies connected with them. For example, Naomi Camper, a committee chair aide from 2001-2004, and Kate Childress, former aide to New York Senator Charles Schumer, have been lobbyists for JP Morgan since 2008. JP Morgan has also helped fund the campaigns of a number of these same committee members.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Tim Johnson has received $81,335 from JP Morgan employees since 1998; Richard Shelby has received $136,771 from employees since 1990; and Mark Warner received $79,150 in 2012 alone. And one wonders why Dimon walked away without even a slap on the wrist.

Goldman Sachs, perhaps the most notorious of the investment banks on Wall Street and an emblem of the corruption of politics by big money that the Occupy Movement addresses, has also contributed to powerful committees and individuals in Congress. So let’s name a few.

House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, for example, have both received large sums from Goldman Sachs, all the while having tens of thousands of their own personal dollars invested in the company — about $32,500 between the two of them, to be exact.

Boehner has received about $29,500 while Cantor has received about $48,150 from the firm. And these two are just a fraction of the 19 congressional members who have invested in the company for a sum total of about $812,000; in return the company has paid out about $124,000 in contributions to those candidates.

This is no less true for vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, who has approximately $8,000 invested in Goldman Sachs and has received double that, or about $15,800, in campaign contributions from them. Though this is nothing compared to his running mate, Mitt Romney, who received a couple of thousand shy of $1 million from Goldman for the 2012 election.

Although President Obama didn’t receive much from the major banks for the 2012 campaign (Wells Fargo was the only big donor, at $289,000), in 2008 he received $1,013,091 from Goldman Sachs, $809,000 from JP Morgan Chase, $736,771 from Citigroup and $512,232 from Morgan Stanley, along with staggering contributions from the University of California, Harvard University, Microsoft, Time Warner, Columbia University, IBM, and General Electric. It’s likely the major banks considered their initial campaign contributions to Obama as a “long-term investment,” one that has paid off immensely: not a single executive from any of the major banks has been criminally prosecuted for their illegal and reckless behavior in the economic meltdown.

And this is the point: both Democrats and Republicans have taken enormous sums from the country’s biggest financial institutions, then repaid those institutions with policies that favor them. With congressional oversight committees under the thumb of the financial sector, banks have been allowed to pursue their fraudulent actions without repercussions. Finally, you don’t need to pay money to get what you want; you just need to hire the right people for influential positions in government. Just look at Obama’s cabinet, and the cabinet of previous presidents:

Tim Geithner – Current Secretary of the Treasury, formerly director of Policy Development and Review at the IMF (2001 to 2003) and president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. In November of 2007 he rejected an offer to become Citibank’s chief executive.

Henry Paulson – Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush, former CEO of Goldman Sachs (1974 to 2006) and a member of Council on Foreign Relations.

William Daley – Previous Chief of Staff under President Obama (2011-2012), COO of Amalgamated Bank of Chicago, Midwest Chairman of JP Morgan Chase since 2004 and member of Council on Foreign Relations.

Jacob Lew – Current Chief of Staff under Obama, COO of Citigroup’s Alternative Investments unit since 2006, and member of Council on Foreign Relations.

Eric Holder – Current Attorney General, previously worked for Covington & Burling LLP, an international law firm that has represented multinational corporations such as Phillip Morris, Halliburton and Xe Services (now known as Academi, formerly known as Blackwater – a company that changed its name twice to dodge a dismal public relations record).

It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that the (In)justice Department and the SEC has dropped all criminal charges against Goldman Sachs for its involvement with the housing market crisis, despite having $1.3 billion worth of subprime mortgage securities on their portfolio.

The Senate report also documented e-mails that referred to these securities as “junk” and “crap.” The company was charged $550 million – a sum of money that is made in weeks.

The most naked example of how our political system has been robbed by the bankers and corporations is the fact that Green Party presidential candidate, Jill Stein, was arrested for attempting to enter the building where the second debate between Obama and Romney was being held.

Why should a woman who has consistently polled at 3% nationally and has raised enough money (yes, it is a criterion) to get on the ballot in 36 states not have a chance to have her voice heard with the heavy corporate hitters? Because the Commission on Presidential Debates, which sets the agenda for this nationally televised theater, accepts donations from corporations whose funds are contingent on the candidates only debating each other.

Certain topics are not raised in the debates, of course, among them climate change, banker bail-outs, campaign finance reform, Mexico’s U.S.-funded drug war, drone strikes, the illegitimacy of the National Defense Authorization Act, the FISA act, the Patriot Act, our treatment of government whistleblowers, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, etc. There is no point debating the issues, after all, if your party duopoly is in agreement.

It’s more than a revolving door we’re talking about. It’s an incest fest. And it’s at times like these that I, and many others, ask: What Would Jesus Do? He explained to us in John 2:15-16 exactly what he would do: “in the temple courts He [Jesus] found men selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said: ‘get these out of here! how dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!'”

We, too, must drive the “money changers” out of our political temple before we can rationally and peacefully progress into the 21st century. This starts with a constitutional amendment to repeal the Citizens United ruling of 2010; the elimination of PACs and super-PACs; and imposing extreme limits, with complete transparency, on all political donations and contributions.

Either this, or we apply our savage consumerist mentality in the most practical sense to our political system: when something breaks, don’t fix it. Throw it out and get a new one.

Shakespeare, Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde could not have asked for a better piece of irony than what has become of the American dream.

A dream that once encompassed the idea of entrepreneurism, individuality and hard work is currently devolving – or, some would argue, has already devolved, into its antithesis: a developing, collectivist, Big Brother society that does not respect privacy, press, speech or religion, that is not transparent or accountable, whose middle class is collapsing and whose State makes decisions without consulting the People, all the while operating under the guise of fealty to old ideals while secretly uprooting them.

Our country is now overrun with executive orders, immunity for telecommunication companies that spy on and wiretap innocent American citizens, data mining by the NSA, excessive and intrusive security at airports, legislation drafted outside of Congress, undeclared wars, billions invested on political theater instead of social programs and curbing poverty, taxpayer bailouts for corrupt financial institutions, severe crackdown on whistleblowing, unconstitutional and illegal drone strikes, torturing facilities, indifference to war crimes, a chain of hundreds of military bases around the world and a restrictive, controlled “free-market” that has given us a Walmart every 10 miles and a McDonald’s every two.

We are now a country wherein 1% of our nation controls about 43 percent of the wealth, more than the entire bottom half of the population; where six corporations control 90 percent of mass media; and where about one in four corporations pay nothing in taxes while getting millions of our dollars in refunds.

In our country today, most politicians are no more than spokesmen employed by wealthy special interests. Meanwhile, people are being foreclosed on by the banks their taxpayer dollars bailed out. They are having to choose between food and rent, as about 47 million Americans now need government help to feed themselves.

The deeper you look, the worse it gets. Our government has contracts with corrupt, private multinational corporations to purchase weapons and surveillance technology while not even receiving a slap on the wrist for blatant war crimes of past administrations. Our taxpayer dollars fund and supply weapons to oppressive oligarchic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen and Kuwait instead of areas at home such as Benton Harbor, Michigan; Gary, Indiana; and Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where the male life expectancy is 48 – the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. All the while, draconian bills to regulate and monitor Internet activity have seen a push in Congress (SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and most importantly, CISPA).

What may be most disturbing about our current state is that most Americans still accept emotionally-charged mantras like “We are land of the free, home of the brave” and ridiculously misguided and ignorant claims that we’re “spreading democracy and freeing nations around the world” (all the while expanding our number of military bases). We tell ourselves that soldiers overseas are dying to ensure our own freedoms at home (to be indefinitely detained without trial, conviction or due process). We are entering a near-psychotic state wherein we chronically see our country for what we want it to be – a constitutional republic – and not for what it really is: a corporatist, surveillance empire.

This illusion and psychosis is maintained in large part through control of the media, but also through the guise of humanitarianism: by bombing metropolitan areas such as Tripoli, and now-defunct award mechanisms such as the Nobel Peace Prize for a president who drops bombs, and a European Union that shoves millions into poverty with crippling, anti-democratic austerity measures.

Our psychosis has reached such a point that we ignore reality and continue indulging in our delusions. For many, it is much easier to believe the lie than to accept the truth because it is so distant from what is truly happening. Many simply reject the data and claim that these facts – surveillance, war crimes, political persecution and detainment without due process – are actions reserved for far-away developing nations and can’t happen here in America.

But they can, and they have, and they are. We as Americans must come to terms with what we have allowed to happen. We must accept what our country has become and quit sticking our heads in the sand and hoping that things will magically get better. They will not. If we look at the track record of our rigid economic-political dynasty governing from Wall Street and Washington, we do not have the leadership to extricate ourselves from this devolving socioeconomic crisis.

We must learn to hit the “Bullshit!” button more often and discredit the meaningless, mind-numbing ideology and doublespeak emanating from Washington if we are to understand what is really going on, because if the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the People’s Republic of China can teach us anything, it’s that terminology and ideals are a great way for governments to operate as legitimate governing bodies performing a puppet show while pulling the important strings behind the stage.

What is austerity? A dictionary definition will provide you with the definition of a “strict economy.” It will also provide you with an antonym: leniency. Although the current austerity practices in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere certainly match those definitions, the implications of enforcing these measures against the will of the majority population — and imposing them as a rational solution to the socioeconomic problems we face — are far graver, dangerous and outright scary.

Let’s examine the conditions of the loans aimed at getting countries (like Greece and Spain) out of debt: they want to raise the retirement age, increase the work day and have people work for lower wages, cut funding to education, maintenance and other important public sector areas, cut Social Security, cut pensions, and even privatize the municipal water and electric systems.

But at least the measures are democratic, right? Wrong. These austerity policies have been entered into and implemented despite resounding political opposition. Almost weekly protests all over Europe have been gathering outside centers of governmental power with signs like “No Nos Representan” (They Don’t Represent Us), or scissors with a slash through it, or the European Union flag peeled away to reveal the flag of Nazi Germany, or “No es la Crisis, es el Sistema” (It’s not a crisis, it’s the System). And many just plain and simply read: NO. And you call this government by the people’s consent?

When austerity measures were first introduced in Greece, George Papandreou, the prime minister at the time, attempted to hold a referendum for the acceptance of the bailout deal but was pressured to resign. He was replaced almost immediately by Lucas Papademos, who was governor of the Bank of Greece from 1994 to 2002 and became vice president of the European Central Bank from 2002 to 2010.

Thus in Greece, the “cradle of democracy” was robbed by bankers. And what does Christine Lagarde, head of the cleverly re-named International Mafia Foundation (IMF), have to say about it? “Pay your taxes. I have more sympathy for children in sub-Saharan Africa.”

A similar situation happened in Italy. Silvio Berlusconi, who was sentenced last week to four years in prison for tax fraud, proposed a referendum to accept the austerity package that was proposed in his country at the time. Under pressure from Congress and from population, he resigned and was replaced by Mario Monti, former European Commissioner from 1995 to 2004, and the minister of economy and finance for two years. The austerity measures were implemented.

One result of these austerity measures is that they give rise to dangerous, desperate and misguided ideologies just as the situations are becoming more unsustainable in those countries. For example, the Golden Dawn, an ultra-right, ultra-nationalist party that rails against immigrants now has approximately 14 percent of Greeks’ support, twice as much as it did in June when Greece elected 18 of its party members to Parliament.

It’s sometimes difficult to understand how economic instability in Europe affects us in the United States; easier to dismiss them as being across the Atlantic, and left to solve their own problems. But their actions do affect us, they can have severe consequences, and vice versa. The LIBOR scandal, for example, should be the number one story of this year. The key banks that receive the LIBOR rate were manipulating that basic interest rate upon which student loans, car and credit card loans are based all over the world; they knew which way the rates would go, then made bets on them.

Essentially, the crisis “over there” has great parallels to our own in the U.S., where a few major banks knowingly sold sub-prime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, treating them as AAA products when they were far from it, and insured these securities with institutions such as AIG. When the housing bubble burst, the bankers didn’t want to pay for their lost bets and insurances so they created a scheme to dump it on the taxpayers. To a large extent they’ve succeeded because of our compliance and refusal to study the issue.

Let’s be clear: there is no easy way out of the so-called crisis. The euro has lasted but 10 years. Under our current rigid, unforgiving, global dynasties of bankers and corporations that comprise the economic and political elite, the solution will always be to remove money from the public sector and the working person, to print more increasingly worthless electronic money, to sign away people’s sovereignty and basic human rights, and to centralize power.

But if we, the people, choose to actually look at and study the problem, it isn’t that there aren’t enough funds. It’s that our money is being allocated and distributed in bluntly unethical ways, funneling toward fewer and fewer people while populations bail out the very criminal enterprises that took us down.

And what’s most frightening and discouraging is that these policies — the ethics of austerity — are being entered into undemocratically, that is, without the support of the citizens they are ostensibly being designed to serve. So let’s say it like it is. Let’s call a spade a spade: through “austerity,” international bankers and corporations are imposing economic neo-feudalism on us all, by seizing the governmental levers of power and using that power to craft legislation and social policy that benefit those corporations and bankers, while rendering the everyday citizen powerless.

The question is, once we understand and openly recognize this truth, what are we going to do about it?

The results were alarming. When I visited the website with the graphs and charts, based on research from the USDA, I found alarming graph that indicated that 61.2 % of all harvested fruit is wasted, and 56% of all harvested vegetables are wasted.

The abstract goes on: …this accounts for 30% of daily calories available for consumption, one-quarter of daily food (by weight) available for consumption, and 7% of annual cropland acreage.

More astonishingly, the volume of discarded food results in a disastrous environmental impact: “the volume of discarded food equivalent to the yearly use of 30m acres of land, 780m pounds of pesticide and 4.2tn gallons of irrigated water. Rotting food also clogs up landfills and releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.”

Consider how much water that is. What a travesty. To think that there are people that are currently thirsty, and we are wasting precious water because we can’t eat what we buy.

This makes me think back to all of the arguments that I have with GMO and factory-farm proponents. They always claim: How else are we going to produce food for the whole world? How else are we going to feed everyone? Not everyone can have a garden or knows how to grow on. Not everyone can afford good food. [Insert another stereotypical argument about mass food production here].

Next time someone tries to feed you their bullcrap, throw this article in their face. Remind them that we have plenty of resources and abilities to feed the public. In fact, given this recent information, is it possible that we are engaged in food overproduction? Clearly, we don’t need more than half of the fruits and vegetables that we are producing or importing. Which presents a different issue: do we really need to import all of this food (although California is responsible for a large portion of our food production)?

It is simply a matter of allocation of resources. We have oodles of money at our disposal. It is simply a sociopolitical oversight, or dare I say, overlooking, that explains why there are still starving individuals in our world. There’s no money in solving a hunger problem. This revelation adds important fuel to this rebuttal: Americans are notorious for wasting food.